ADHD / Anxiety Archives

When To Consider Executive Function Coaching

September 20, 2021 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

With parents and educators growing more attuned to the broad range of factors that affect students’ success, executive function coaching has become an increasingly popular part of families’ educational planning. Based on explicit instruction to develop strategies for organization, time management, and effective task completion, executive function coaching is often used when relative weaknesses or significant deficits in these areas are impeding students’ school success. However, executive function coaching isn’t just for students and families in crisis; this holistic professional support can be invaluable for all learners at any age. Executive functioning is as essential and teachable as reading or mathematics, and it’s worth considering even when your student isn’t actively struggling in school.

Here are four situations in which you might want to consider executive function coaching:

1. If your student is about to start at a new school.

Whether transferring to a completely new school or even just entering middle or high school, school transitions can be stressful for even the most successful students. New schools (and new grades at familiar schools) often come with new scheduling systems, different teacher expectations, unfamiliar online portals, and a whole host of other nitty-gritty details that can be overwhelming and difficult to manage. Executive function coaching is a great tool for making these transitions easier on the whole family. During dedicated time with an executive function coach, students have the opportunity to plan out new routines, parse the details of unfamiliar requirements, and integrate effective scheduling and organizational tools into their academic plans. This kind of preparation can turn transitions into productive new beginnings rather than stressful setbacks.

2. If you have a hectic family schedule.

Executive function coaching isn’t just for academics; its benefits transfer readily from the academic arena to the rest of a student’s life. Most extracurriculars involve the same need for planning and organization that school does—think scheduling piano practice or keeping soccer gear tidy—and it’s often easier to get students invested in extracurricular success than academic success. Consequently, executive function coaching can help students develop more effective routines and habits around all of their extracurriculars, which is often an enormous asset to families balancing multiple busy schedules. When students are able to take full charge of their own passions, there’s less burden on parents and siblings, making day-to-day activities easier for everyone. What’s more, practicing executive function strategies outside of school also helps students succeed in applying them at school.

3. If your student is being treated for anxiety, ADHD, or another emotional or behavioral challenge.

Executive function challenges often correlate to ADHD diagnoses and can sometime exacerbate the difficulties of students with conditions like anxiety or OCD. If, for example, an anxious student lacks the executive function skills to keep her school papers in order, the resulting confusion can increase her anxiety around school and homework. Conversely, having a robust toolkit for staying organized and planning tasks can be an especially meaningful asset for such students. Executive function coaching can be a helpful complement to mental health treatment, and executive function coaches can even work collaboratively with mental health professionals to ensure a consistent, sensitive approach to each student’s unique challenges and strengths.

4. If your student is just starting to struggle with time management or organization.

Often, students start executive function coaching long after they begin to have difficulty with time management, organization, and related issues. But executive function coaching is just as helpful—and arguably more helpful—for students who are showing only early signs of executive function challenges. This might be an elementary schooler who likes school but can’t keep her desk clean, a middle schooler who gets good grades but starts losing homework when his class schedule becomes more complicated, or a high school freshman whose new extracurriculars are causing her worry over getting everything done. A little bit of intervention early on can go a long way toward keeping these minor issues from becoming major ones, so it’s worth considering professional support whenever you start to notice challenges like these.

It’s easy to overlook the key role that executive function plays in all students’ success, but it’s always worth considering when a little extra support in this crucial area might be the small step that makes all the difference.

Please contact our office to discuss your student’s needs in more detail.

By Hannah Sheldon Dean, Private Tutor and Executive Function Coach

Why Write A Five-Paragraph Essay?

September 16, 2021 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Among the genres of writing projects that students experience in upper elementary, middle and high school, the five-paragraph essay is one of the most popular. Well, it’s popular with teachers. With students, just saying the phrase “five-paragraph essay” can evoke audible groans. For those writers, it calls to mind themes of dullness and standardization, a static formula. Yet the form is a valid one for a number of reasons, and in the right conditions, it can encourage creative thinking instead of stifling it. In fact, among the benefits of the five-paragraph essay are valuable opportunities for writers in terms of cognition, rhetoric, and culture.

There’s a reason that Bloom’s Taxonomy, a hierarchy of thinking processes, lists “creation” as its most complex category: whether a student is investigating a hypothesis, building a contraption, or writing an essay, creating something new is a difficult task. A major component of this difficulty is what educators and psychologists call cognitive load, the amount of working memory resources a task demands of the person performing it. In her widely cited article “A Capacity Theory of Writing: Working Memory in Composition,” the educational scholar Deborah McCutchen illustrates the cognitive load of writing: “to compose a text, skilled writers coordinate within working memory planning goals (e.g., plans for content, audience, overall tone, etc.) and product goals (e.g. requirements of grammaticality, plan fulfillment, etc.) while language generation processes retrieve words to express content and organize those words into appropriate text (see Flower and Hayes, 1980, 1981, 1984 McCutchen, 1994).” Understandably, it can be difficult for a writer to attend to all of these processes at once, and if the cognitive load is too high, the writer might not be able to complete the task. One way to lighten this load is to focus on different aspects of the writing process and product at different times; educators have adopted this principle in frameworks like the 6+1 Writing Traits or Judith Hochman’s Teaching Basic Writing Skills. Because it offers a consistent structure, one of the major benefits of the five-paragraph essay is that once a writer is familiar with it, using that framework for planning frees more of their cognitive load. With their basic organizational scheme already chosen, the writer can attend more fully to other aspects of their work, such as ideas, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, and presentation.

In thinking of the rhetorical power of the five-paragraph essay form, rather than the total number of paragraphs, we should consider a different number, a bit of a magical number: three. In his book Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, Roy Peter Clark discusses the hidden power of numbers in language. Citing examples such as “Moe, Larry, and Curly. Tinkers to Evers to Chance. A priest, a minister, and a rabbi. Executive, legislative, judicial,” he notes that “In our language and culture, three provides a sense of the whole.” There’s just something about a set of three things that resounds with people. In allowing the writer to use three body paragraphs to set forth three main points, the five-paragraph essay invites the writer to tap into this power. It is worth noting that three is not the only powerful number. For instance, before they learn the five-paragraph essay form, many students learn the four-paragraph essay, which reemerges occasionally in high school. This form allows students to graduate from three-paragraph essays, whose single body paragraph generally explores one major point, to use two body paragraphs to explore a duality within their topic.

The cultural argument for the five-paragraph essay may, at first, seem self-serving: It is useful because it is widely used. But just as it serves a purpose for writers, it serves a purpose for readers. Faced with this familiar form, readers know to look for a guiding claim or thesis statement at the end of the first paragraph. Anticipating how the structure works makes it easier for the reader to comprehend the piece. This is not to say that all five-paragraph essays work the exact same way. As we noted above, the advantage of a familiar structure is to let students concentrate on other aspects of writing, so as students progress, their ideas should grow more sophisticated even within this same form. Their order of body paragraphs should have a perceptible logic, their analyses should be complex, and rather than serving as a simple summary, their conclusion could emphasize the significance of their argument. Even after writers move on to longer and more complex forms, they may still find occasion to access the benefits of the five-paragraph essay. Two of the highest-stakes pieces in high school, the ACT or SAT essay and the main Common Application statement, lend themselves well to the form. In both the ACT and SAT, testers must compose a complete essay in less than an hour. If they enter the test already tentatively knowing what their structure will be, they will save valuable minutes of writing time. The urgency of time is also a factor for the essays’ audiences. Both the test essays and the Common Application essay are read by people who are consuming a high volume of pieces and consuming them quickly — in the case of the application essay, in just a few minutes. It is to the writer’s advantage to make the reader’s job easier by giving them a vivid, specific essay in a structure that is easy to follow.

The students who rail against five-paragraph essays might be surprised to hear that the form is controversial in academia as well; in fact, a new book by the college instructor John Warner, titled Why They Can’t Write, is subtitled Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities. While we don’t want to kill the five-paragraph essay, we agree that the form has at least one downside: the potential for overuse. If every piece a student composes is a five-paragraph essay, that’s a problem. No single structure, essay or otherwise, should encompass all of a student writer’s experiences in a school year, or even in a single class. Writers of all ages need opportunities to wrestle with form. We don’t want writers to believe, as even some first-year college students do, that big ideas always come in threes, or that one paragraph is always sufficient for sharing their thoughts on one of those ideas. Notably, hardly any pieces of “real world” writing, including published essays, take the form of a five-paragraph essay. That’s another downside: ultimately, the structure is too simple for public discourse. Even as we help students understand and access the benefits of the five-paragraph essay, we must emphasize that the form acts like a set of writerly training wheels. Eventually, with instructors’ guidance, students need to shift from letting form determine their ideas to letting their ideas determine form. At that point, the training wheels should fall away, and writers will zoom forward, perhaps a little wobbly at times, but entirely under their own power.

By Elizabeth Walters, Private Tutor and Writing Coach

5 Pillars of a Strong Reading Program

September 13, 2021 alla Leave a Comment

A strong reading program includes five components (or pillars) that are based on a systematic, explicit research-based approach to phonics instruction as well as addressing reading and writing. Successful implementation requires careful planning and explicit instruction that teaches concepts and skills in a systematic and logical manner as well as using a backward design model to ensure that teaching matches desired learning outcomes. The five pillars of a strong reading program include:

Phonemic awareness

Phonemic awareness is awareness of the sounds that make up spoken words. There are two levels of phonological awareness. Phonemic awareness is the more advanced level and is characterized by a sensitivity to large units of sound such as words, syllables, and syllable parts (onset and rime). According to the National Reading Panel and more current reading research, the two phonemic awareness skills that have the greatest impact on learning to read are segmenting and blending. Phonemic awareness helps students learn to read by forming a connection between visual information about the word as it appears in print and its meaning, pronunciation, and other information in the child’s vocabulary.

Phonics

Phonics is a way of teaching beginning reading and spelling that emphasizes the relationship between letters and sounds. Phonics instruction helps students use these relationships to read and spell rapidly.

Fluency and Expressiveness

Fluency and expressiveness is the ability to read orally with speed, accuracy, and proper expression. A more recent understanding of fluency includes using phrasing and emphasis in a way that makes what is being read sound like spoken language. There is a close relationship between fluency and comprehension. Students with fluency challenges often have challenges with comprehension. There are two instructional approaches usually used to practice reading: guided repeated oral reading and independent silent reading. The National Reading Panel determined that guided repeated oral reading has a significant and positive impact on word recognition, reading fluency, and comprehension for students of all ages.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary instruction and repeated contact with vocabulary words is important to the continued development of reading
comprehension and fluency. It is defined as words we need to know to communicate with others and plays an important part in comprehension. Vocabulary instruction can also serve as a springboard for meaningful word study.

Comprehension

Comprehension is the ability to make meaning from print using background knowledge, making predictions, making connections
(text-to-text, text-to-self, text-to-world), and making inferences. As students age up into the intermediate and upper elementary grades, written output becomes an important measure of comprehension.

Reading and writing are intertwined processes and both have their foundation in oral language development. As students learn about reading, their writing improves and vise versa. To become successful readers and writers, young children — even preschoolers — need to have lots of experience with oral language, phonological awareness, alphabetic principle, concepts about print, and comprehension. This video demonstrates a sample of a strong reading program in a primary classroom.

By Brad Hoffman, Board Certified Educational Planner and Learning Specialist, and Laurie Gross, Educational Consultant and Reading Specialist.

First Grade Reading Skills

September 7, 2021 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

The concepts that young readers learn in preschool, kindergarten and first grade will provide a strong foundation for them as they master more complicated texts in the school years to come. These most basic skills are vital to their future success as readers. Unfortunately, many students do not develop a robust toolbox of strategies when they are young, and they then can fall behind when texts become more sophisticated and content-heavy. In order to succeed in the upper elementary years and beyond, students need to learn critical reading skills and strategies when they are young. The older a student becomes, the more challenging it can be to close the gap and remediate reading instruction.

In first grade, students need to learn:

Comprehension and Metacognitive Strategies

The point of reading is understanding. Students need to notice when the text does not make sense so they can self-correct their mistakes. Students must learn to reread words and sentences and to use pictures and context clues to help understand difficult texts. Without self-correcting strategies, students often have no idea if what they just read is correct or makes sense.

Basic Story Structure (character, setting, problem, solution)

Students who understand the basic elements of a story have a much easier time understanding why and how events occur in the story, which will in turn help their comprehension of the story. Knowing story structure will also help develop students’ writing skills.

Decoding Skills

In order to tackle unfamiliar words students must have solid sound-letter correspondence and be able to blend sounds together. In addition, knowledge of spelling patterns, including silent or “magic” letters and vowel and consonant combinations (ea, th, ch etc.) will help students be able to decode text

Sight Words

Students who have memorized a large vocabulary of high-frequency sight words (i.e. that, are, one, the etc.) will usually be able to read much smoother and faster than those who have not worked on these words at length.

Students who have mastered these concepts by the end of first grade will be well on their way to becoming strong readers in the upper elementary grades. For students who are struggling with these skills, contact us to get started with an individualized plan for literacy development with one of our reading specialists or learning specialists.

By Joanna Brown and Laurie Gross, Reading Specialists

Enhancing Your Digital Workstation

August 24, 2021 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

With public schools and private schools resuming for this new school year, all of our families are actively engaged in virtual, hybrid or in-person learning. Since the start of Covid, we’ve heard a lot of feedback from families and school colleagues about this huge adjustment to the multiple locations their students need to navigate and organizing a digital workstation that works well in each location. Technology hiccups and some lost instructional time occurred, too, which was anticipated. In the virtual learning space, parents have found themselves doing a lot of teaching, particularly in the morning, in order to help their kids get ready for planned classes or teacher check-ins during the day. Many parents have also felt overwhelmed trying to print resources, access sites, or troubleshoot sessions during their own work day.

Based on families’ feedback, there seems to be variability across schools and between schools. One concern we’ve continued to hear— from teachers and families — is that poor wifi strength creates instructional disruptions; and digital tools require patience and troubleshooting, which can be difficult for many students to manage independently. To that end, it’s important to think strategically about both your physical and digital workstations as we’ll continue to make use of these tools in the coming months and years. Faya and I have been working from home for over 12 years now, so we know it takes a lot of careful planning and investment. To the extent you’re able to optimize your own physical and digital workstation, and your child’s own physical digital workstation, it stands to make distance learning and working remotely a more joyous, productive, and positive experience.

To help, we’ve put together the following “Think Abouts” for organizing your physical and digital workspaces:

Your Physical and Digital Workstation

Do you and your child each have separate physical and digital workstations?
Does your child have an ample supply of writing tools, including pencils, pens, highlighters, markers, or crayons as appropriate? Are these well organized at your child’s workstation in order to minimize lost time and disruptions?
Would your child benefit from either a small white board and/or larger white board for managing goals, to-do items, sub-tasking larger assignments, or planning?
Do you have tools to support time management, including various types of timers or a big, non-ticking analog clock with a glass face on which students can write with dry erase markers to actively “mark up” their intended timing?
Is there a visual and/or auditory barrier to help mitigate disruptions?
Do you have sufficient lighting?
Would your student benefit from a standing desk or balance board?
Where is the printer? Who accesses it? How frequently? If your child likes to print things, are you stocked up on paper and toner?
If you or your child only works on a laptop or an iPad, might you benefit from upgrading to a larger monitor (or two)? When doing a lot of research across multiple sources or documents, or using a number of applications simultaneously, it can be easier to stay organized on a larger and/or multiple screens. A larger monitor also allows for enlarged text, which can make reading, editing, or revising easier.
Do you and/or your child have a writing tablet with a stylus?
Do you and/or your child have a small document camera (which can also serve as a webcam)?
Would your child or family benefit from a small, high-speed scanner?
Would your elementary or middle school child benefit from a small math center stocked with concrete manipulatives, such as base ten blocks, fraction towers, a yard stick, a geared clock, a geoboard, or geometry solids?
Do you have a small home library of picture books or chapter books in print?

Digital Platforms and Related Skills

Do you or your child know how to use digital white boarding?
Do you or your child know more than one way to manage screen sharing?
Do you or your child know more than one way to connect by video conference? Have you or your child practiced extensively with each of these platforms, including Zoom, Google Hangouts, Skype, or FaceTime.
Do you or your child have familiarity with Google Classroom?
Do you or your child know how to manage Google Drive in order to create shared folders and facilitate collaborative writing? Does this management include creating folders and managing documents so that they’re organized and searchable in effective ways?
Is your phone a hotspot? Do you know how to use it? This contingency planning is important in the event that Spectrum — or whomever your internet service provider (ISP) is — experiences an interruption.

Wifi Troubleshooting Tips

Wifi strength depends on a number of factors, including the incoming signal strength, the modem device, the router device, distance from the router and overall square footage, and the building materials.
When was the last time you restarted both your modem and your router as regular maintenance? As a simple first step, try unplugging each device, restarting the modem first, and then restarting the router in order to resolve any performance issues.
How old is your router? How many square feet is it covering? The new mesh routers are really good. We just installed a Netgear Orbi — there are several versions available, including the newest which supports wifi6 (although that speed and expense isn’t necessary) — and the setup was pretty quick and painless. The improved performance is notable and it resolved dead spots for us right away. Moreover, there are easy to use parent controls built into the mobile app, which allows parents to turn off specific devices from accessing wifi.
Could your child’s laptop or desktop be hard wired to the router rather than relying on wifi? If the laptop doesn’t allow for this connection, selecting a larger monitor to which it could connect might then allow for this option.

We know that optimizing a physical and digital workstation — or dealing with digital infrastructure — is a lot to manage. At the same time, it’s a concrete step that can help to improve the instructional experience and restore a certain level or order while directly building executive function and new digital skills.

If you have questions, concerns, or ideas, we’d be happy to listen, help, and troubleshoot with you as needed. Our digital coaching can be differentiated for students of all ages, including adults! Please don’t hesitate to reach out!

By Brad Hoffman, M.S.Ed.
Board Certified Educational Planner and Learning Specialist
My Learning Springboard, Inc.

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